Cigarettes are bad for you and they smell terrible. But bars aren't meant to be healthy and clean. An unlikely endorsement from a nonsmoker.

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I don't smoke. Never have. Never will. I believe everything I've ever heard about the dangers of cigarettes. But bars are supposed to be subversive. Uninhibited, noisy, smoky. This was the atmosphere that put you in such a panic to grow up. Once you did, you appreciated the bar even more as one of the few places where the freedom to be an adult — in your behavior, contemptible opinions, hookups, vices — was never seriously curtailed.

Yeah, it's nice to come home with clothes that don't smell like an ashtray, but I miss the grime. I miss our history together. This country was founded on the tobacco trade; our Revolution was planned between swigs and puffs in musty places like Boston's Green Dragon Tavern; Bogie wouldn't have been Bogie without the coffin nails (to say nothing of Keith Richards); and Joe's Corner Tap isn't as fun when half the working-class regulars — the real target of this antismoking jihad — have to bail out mid-argument to huddle in the rain just to get in a relaxing huff. By kowtowing to yet another milepost on the road to American pussification, we might be saving our lungs, but we're killing our seditious hearts.